[Sidenote: Where is Hindustan?]

_Hindustan_, or the land of the Hindus, is a term that never had any
geographical definiteness. In the mouths of Indians it meant the central
portion of the plain of North India; in English writers of half a
century ago it was often used when all India was meant. In exact writing
of the present time, the term is practically obsolete.

[Sidenote: Who speak Hindustani?]

Unfortunately for clearness, the term _Hindustani_ not only survives,
but survives in a variety of significations. The word is an adjective,
_pertaining to Hindustan_, and in English it has become the name either
of the people of Hindustan or of their language. It is in the latter
sense that the name is particularly confusing. The way out of the
difficulty lies in first associating _Hindustani_ clearly with the
central region of Hindustan, the country to the north-east of Agra and
Delhi. These were the old imperial capitals, be it remembered. Then from
that centre, the Hindustani language spread--a central, imperial,
Persianised language not necessarily superseding the other
vernaculars--wherever the authority of the empire went. Thus throughout
India, Hindustani became a _lingua franca_, the imperial language. In
the Moghul Empire of Northern India it was exactly what "King's English"
was in the Anglo-Norman kingdom in England in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries. French was the language of the Anglo-Norman court
of London, as Persian of the court of Delhi or Agra; the Frenchified
King's English was the court form of the vernacular in England, as the
Persianised Hindustani in North India. It was this _lingua franca_ that
Europeans in India set themselves to acquire.